Infant diet : a lecture / by A. Jacobi. Delivered May 8, 1873. Revised, enlarged, and adapted to popular use by Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D.

  • Jacobi, A. (Abraham), 1830-1919.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Infant diet : a lecture / by A. Jacobi. Delivered May 8, 1873. Revised, enlarged, and adapted to popular use by Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    plant lie outside its body, but in the infant's body the roots are inside, lining in infinite number the walls of the stomach and intestine, whence they reach down into the fluids that fill these canals, and draw up nourish- ment to be absorbed into the blood. So long as the food is still in the digestive tube, it is as much outside the body as are the salts in the earth penetrated by the rootlets of plants. Yet as the composition of that soil will determine the kind of plants that may spring from it, here wheat, there barley or oats—here the pine, there the luxuriant olive—so upon the substances that are introduced into the alimentary canal, and on the chem- ical changes that take place there, largely depends the character of all the tissues of the body. In a plant, where the life is purely nutritive, that is, where there are no functions involving muscles or nerves, it is much easier to study the relations between the food and the tissues, than it is in an animal, in whom these relations are so incessantly modified by the influence of the ner- vous system. We analyze what is absorbed by the leaves and the roots, what is exhaled from the leaves again, and finally the substance of which the plant is composed, and we can then judge pretty well of the nature of the changes through which the food has